Lilia comes back with me the following week.

  She walks through the apartment slowly, touching things lightly, not picking them up. She stands in front of the note on the wall for a long time without saying anything.

  Then she turns around and she has the photograph in her hand, the one from the box. She holds it up.

  “She looks like you,” she says. “I didn’t see it before. I see it now.”

  “She does,” I say.

  Lilia looks at the photograph for another moment. Then she puts it down gently on the desk, face up, so Elise is looking at the room.

  We stand in the apartment together.

  Two people who loved the same person from different distances. One who had her for two years and didn’t know what she had. One who had her for five years, left, and spent twenty telling herself it was fine.

  Neither of us says anything for a while.

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  Then Lilia asks: “What was she like? When she was little.”

  I think about it.

  “She was loud,” I say. “She narrated everything. She’d watch Sebastian’s car leave in the morning and give a full commentary. He’s turning, he turned, he’s gone.” I pause. “She laughed at a fruit arrangement in her lunchbox once and I kept making it every day after that. I never knew if she still looked at it.”

  Lilia smiles. Small and real.

  “She kept a notebook,” I say. “Under her mattress. She wrote questions she didn’t have answers to.”

  “I didn’t know about the notebook.”

  “She didn’t tell anyone.” I look at the desk. “She carried things alone. I know what that costs because I did it too, for years, in that house.” I pause. “But I found a way out. Dylan. You. Twenty years of building something that held.” I look at Lilia. “She didn’t get that. She carried it the same way I did but she carried it longer and with less to hold onto and it cost her everything.”

  And I taught her how, I think. I didn’t know I was teaching her. But she learned it from me. The quiet. The fine. The face that holds when nothing underneath it does.

  I got out. She didn’t. That’s the whole of it.

  Lilia puts her arm through mine.

  We stand there in the afternoon light, in my daughter’s room, with the note on the wall and the photograph on the desk and the letters in the drawer.

  I remember her.

  I’m going to keep remembering her.

  That’s all that’s left and it’s not nothing. It’s the only thing I have that’s entirely mine.

  I remember, I think.

  I remember. I remember.

  I remember.